I guess we can be thankful, after watching last night’s deeply troubling U.S. presidential debate as we digested the remnants of our Canadian-grown supply-managed turkey, that things haven’t reached quite to the same stage in this country.

They likely will, though, as all political ideas from the United States eventually make it across the 49th Parallel, especially the bad ones, and many of our American cousins’ worst political sins are already here in abundance.

Still, it’s a pretty appalling commentary on the state of affairs south of the Medicine Line that the spectacle of one candidate threatening to throw the other one in jail if he manages to get elected and stalking around the stage behind her like Bela Lugosi in Plan 9 from Outer Space didn’t seem to trouble commentators all that much.

Nor was it particularly reassuring that the sensible candidate in this debate appeared to be threatening to start a war with a nuclear-armed power – which, if nothing else, suggests as a gesture of sanity and survival we Canadians may want to get the peace movement up to speed again as quickly as possible!

At any rate, on the U.S. network I was watching, the pundits apparently thought Donald Trump’s performance wasn’t bad enough to warrant any more Republican leaders deserting his campaign as it settles deeper in the water.

They seemed to think those Republicans who hadn’t already scuttled down the hawsers would probably stick around so as not to annoy the disaffected lunatic fringe that longs for a caudillo like Mr. Trump to fix America’s woes … unless the polls take another drastic dip in the next few hours, of course.

That could happen, because women viewers can’t have much liked the Republican candidate’s creepy performance dogging Hillary Clinton’s footsteps around the stage at Washington University in St. Louis. If so, we may see another round of strategic Republican defections. Indeed, this morning the New York Times tried to suggest that was about to happen.

Still, it appears likely the damage done to Mr. Trump’s campaign by the Washington Post’s release Friday of the now immortal recording of his decade-old groping commentary has already all but destroyed his campaign. To stick with the maritime metaphor, his vessel has been holed below the waterline and all that remains is for it to slip beneath the waves, albeit noisily. Trying to pass off his rebarbative behaviour as mere locker-room banter probably didn’t help all that much.

Indeed, Ms. Clinton may have stuck to warily playing defence as much as she did on Napoleon Bonaparte’s sensible advice that you should “never interfere with your enemy when he’s destroying himself.”

In a piece published a few hours before the debate, the New York Times suggested Mr. Trump’s problem was that Good Republicans – a largely imaginary category of humanity not dissimilar to Good Germans in the 1930s and Good Southerners in the 1850s – had finally had enough of Mr. Trump’s bigotry and bullying.

“It turns out that even the most self-interested members of the political class, the true weather vanes swinging in the wind, have their limits,” the Times opined hopefully. “After 16 months of accumulated doubts, embarrassments and indignities, they are finally fed up.”

I don’t think so. The defections are best explained by simple arithmetic. Mr. Trump could get away with threatening Muslim-Americans, insulting Mexican-Americans, questioning Barack Obama’s birthplace and mocking American soldiers killed in battle if they happened to have been raised in the wrong faith because all that appealed to the Republican Party’s base, which frankly doesn’t sound that different from the Wildrose Party’s base here in Alberta.

But he couldn’t slip off the hook for the same casual and threatening contempt for women because pretty well all women get it about the kind of repellant behaviour he described in the recording. There’s a simple reason for that: almost all women have experienced it.

This is why, once the strategically timed October release of the recording of Mr. Trump’s groping commentary had taken place, he was all but done for anyway.

As soon as enough conservative women had walked away from Mr. Trump because of his repulsive behaviour for the polls to start reflecting the change, that was the moment – and the reason – Republican leaders who hitherto had stood by silently began to head for the exits. All of a sudden they were forced to contemplate their own political survival “down-ticket,” as they say Stateside.

So don’t expect the Republican Party – or its fervent imitators here in the Great White North – to change very much in the future. They’ll just pick their victims with more care.

There’s a reason Wildrose supporters show up at party rallies wearing Trump-like red-and-white Make Alberta Debt-Free Again ball caps. That said, in fairness to the Canadian right, just now it has no potential leaders that are quite as loathsome as Mr. Trump. But just as the American Right, addicted to divisive wedge politics, is likely to seek a new Donald Trump with a better strategic mind now that this campaign appears to have foundered, we can expect to see more Canadian Trump types urged on by right-wing talent scouts like the Manning Centre if they show any potential for success.

After all, as it becomes more difficult for neoliberal hothouses everywhere to pass off their political standard bearers as reasonable creatures of the centre right, the temptation to descend into identity politics to advance their agenda will be powerful. Kellie Leitch, c’mon down!

Of course, some American political phenomena are bound to affect Canadian parties of the centre and left too, especially if they appear to be the only effective way to fight back against well-established tactics of the right.

Consider the timing of the release of Mr. Trump’s recording. Edmonton political commentator Chanchal Bhattacharya observed in an essay, unfortunately seen only on Facebook, that “everything about the latest ‘Trump Eruption’ suggests to me a carefully planned and well executed effort to highlight Trump’s repugnant behaviour, in a way that ensures an intensifying cascade of media attention and reports that are optimally disruptive to his campaign, and to the Republican Party more generally.”

In Dr. Bhattacharya’s view, the key to classic political “opposition research” is “deep secrecy and deniability.” In other words, the ability to lead the media horse to water on the assumption it won’t be able to resist the temptation to take a deep draught, but without letting on who led it there. “The goal is to ensure the information comes to light, via reputable sources, at the moment they can inflict the greatest harm and dislocation to the opposing candidate and campaign.”

Indeed, we have already seen this phenomenon in Alberta, as in the well-timed 2012 release of information about the evangelical pastor running for the Wildrose Party whose views on the eternal future of his gay fellow citizens became public at exactly the wrong moment for the party’s success.

As ungentlemanly as it may seem, Canadian political parties that ignore trends like this in U.S. campaign strategy do so at their own peril.

14 Comments to: Canadians can be thankful for small, and probably temporary, mercies in wake of U.S. presidential debate

Dave

October 10th, 2016

Its instructive that the biggest modern route in American politics, which was Johnson vs. Goldwater in 1964, was still 61-39. There’s this basic segment of the population that likes it politics nationalistic and authoritarian. While they may or may not turn out in any given election if they don’t have an interest in the candidates, there’s a theoretical lower bound to their influence, what you might call the Adorno limit or the Altemeyer line.

That’s what we’re seeing here. There’s a lot of hand-wringing about what it’ll actually take for Trump to finally lose his support and/or drop out. That hand-wringing misses the point entirely. These people won’t stop supporting him because its his very awfulness that they like. The more racist, sexist and fascist the guy is, the stronger those people feel for him because they are themselves racist, sexist and fascist. So the Adorno limit is a real line, and won’t collapse. All you can hope is that the candidate that inspires that kind of loyalty in the neofascists doesn’t also attract a sizable contingent of low-info voters.

Ron

There could be a bigger event that could attract, to Trump, a “sizable contingent of low-info voters”.

The Donald will earn many more votes in the secret ballot booth than the support he gets in “public” and in opinion polls. (ala Harper) This group will likely include the McCain & Ryan types.

An October surprize of some magnitude could still propel the orange buffoon into the White House…..
What would’ve been the outcome of our own election had the timing of the Eagles of Death Metal attack been reversed with the boy-on-the-beach incident?

Tom in ontario

pogo

Filostrato

October 11th, 2016

As David Rakoff once said about the Repubs in the U.S. in a CBC interview (?) a while ago, just when you think you’ve reached the bottom of the barrel of slime, a trap door opens and drops you into MORE slime. (I’m paraphrasing. I can’t find the exact quote.)

Donald Trump is so skin-crawlingly repulsive that it’s hard to see how anyone of any persuasion could stand to be in the same room with him. The fact that he has supporters is even more frightening.

As for our own version on this side of the border, they only seem to be interested in winning the next election. They don’t really care what they do or how they do it. Chris Alexander was bemoaning the fact the “barbaric practices snitch line” idea lost them the election, not the the fact that it was a loathsome idea to start with. I don’t know whether he’s declared that he’s running for the Con leadership yet. Maybe he and Leitch can have a go at ripping each other’s innards out. I wish I could care but I don’t.

David

October 11th, 2016

There are so many things that can be said about Trump and his campaign, but one lesson that I think will be learned out of what may end up being a debacle for the Republicans is politics at that level is not for amateurs. Mr. Trump is essentially an opinionated, bored billionaire who could buy the biggest platform for his ego, so he did. Some Edmontonians may remember a controversial millionaire hockey team owner here in the 1980’s who dabbled in politics too. If you want to see Trump’s possible future, look where Peter Pocklington ended up. It isn’t a good place.

It is fashionable these days in some circles to be contemptuous of “elites” and I suppose anyone in politics with any experience is tainted in some peoples eyes. However, in sports I couldn’t imagine a major league hockey team putting players who never even played in the minor leagues and expecting to be successful. As far as I know, Trump has never been elected to any office before. I am not saying being the ultimate insider is the best candidate – probably not, but having some experience like being a governor or a senator is not totally a bad thing.

I suppose the Republican party will have a lot of soul searching to do after the election – if they still have a soul and haven’t sold it to the devil. Hopefully lessons will be learned about the dangers of pandering too much to the kooks and cranks.

pogo

October 12th, 2016

But just think. Representation by population. No extra leverage by way of money. I’m not sure the billionaire class would fare less well by any significant margin, but I’m certain that financial victimization would be reduced.

jerrymacgp

October 15th, 2016

“…carefully planned and well executed effort to highlight Trump’s repugnant behaviour…” Maybe so, but in order for such a strategy to be successful, there needs to be repugnant behaviour to be highlighted. Mr Trump has sunk to new depths in terms of highlightable repugnant behaviour; can we blame his opponents for choosing the most strategic time to out him? If he hadn’t behaved like that, there would have been nothing to publish on how appalling he is.